During Christmas in Iraq, Phil Klay gave his Marines books for the holidays. #bookgift

Each day from now through Hanukkah and on to Christmas, we'll post an author's reflection on giving books as holiday gifts. Follow us on Twitter @ChiTribBooks to be alerted to new posts and tell us about your book-related holiday memories by using #giftbook.

Phil Klay

Author of the 2014 National Book Award-winner "Redeployment"

In 2007, I spent Christmas in Iraq and gave my Marines books as presents. They were all sharp guys, good readers and writers and photographers. My senior enlisted man was both a truly exceptional Marine and a truly outrageous character known as "Pops" Hauser. I gave him Shusaku Endo's "Silence," a novel about two idealistic 17th-century Catholic missionaries to Japan who are prepared for martyrdom, but not for the level of suffering their flock experiences at the hands of Japanese authorities. A book becomes better when you share it with a thoughtful reader, and I can't think of "Silence" now without thinking of the long, searching conversations the two of us had about it out in the desert.

Dec. 20

Molly Antopol

Author of “The UnAmericans”

I met my college boyfriend in a literature class where we were both first introduced to Grace Paley's writing. I can remember so clearly the first day we rode our bikes out to the beach and discovered that we each couldn’t stop thinking about her stories: He loved Paley for her compression and humor, I because I had never before read someone who so perfectly captured the voices of my relatives. We broke up senior year, and if it weren’t for Facebook I doubt we’d even know what state the other lives in, but just the other day I pulled the first Hanukkah present he ever gave me down off my bookshelf: Grace Paley’s “The Collected Stories.” I have multiple copies of this book (I always seem to want it when I’m away from home), but there was the inscribed edition he gave me and all the notes I’d made in the margins as a 20 year old, bringing back the thrill I’d felt reading those stories for the first time. Looking back on those notes now, 15 years later, I realize I’m still circling around many of the same obsessions in my work. It is no exaggeration to say that reading those stories made me want to be a writer.

Dec. 19

Lauren Beukes

Author of "Broken Monsters"

My South African cover designer is a brilliant illustrator who works under the moniker Joey Hi-Fi, but his real name is Dale Halvorsen, and he's one of my oldest, coolest friends. A few years ago, he went to London and came back laden with presents, including the brick-sized paperback collection edition of Jeff Smith's fantasy epic "Bone." I loved the hell out of Smith's whimsical comic that took him 20 years to complete. It's the story of Fone Bone and his cousins who stumble into the middle of a war between a valley of dragons, a lost princess, the lord of the locusts, the dreaming, and quiche-loving rat creatures. I counted the days until I would be able to share it with my then-2-year-old daughter. At 5, I tried her out, but she's a color snob and refused to even look at the black-and-white edition, which meant I had to scour the Internet for a secondhand color edition.

I was giddy with nerves when it finally arrived in the post. Would she like it as much as I did? She was wary at first, but we read it every night and I did all the voices: Clint Eastwood for the Red Dragon, sneery Jim Carrey for Phoney Bone with his scams, scary Tilda Swinton for the Lord of the Locusts, a chipmunked Billy Bob Thornton for Ted, the bug, and my favorite, because they got the best dialogue in raspy evil voices, the "stupid, stupid rat creatures." She loved it. Utterly.

It took us three months to get through the whole thing. That night, I turned the final page, and K sighed with contentment. "Now that was a good story," she declared.

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books. She read mostly best-sellers: Frederick Forsyth, John le Carré, James Michener, Jacqueline Susann (Sparkle, Neely, sparkle!), and ... wait for it ... Harold Robbins.

My dear Harold was the writer who captured my heart toward the end of my preteens. It wasn't just the sex, I swear, although that certainly was part of it. I was 12, after all. I do have to say that his is a much-maligned oeuvre, whose value to sexually deprived young boys is underappreciated. The sweeping emotional dramas, the grand betrayals, the triumph of good, and delightful sentences like "She stroked his penis with two fingers," were perfect reading when I was 12. The book that snared me was "The Carpetbaggers."

In those days I fell in and out of love with writers quicker than Byron, but that book, "The Carpetbaggers," was a marker. After it, I began to read books that were a bit different, I began to grow. I still read everything in sight for quite a while, but Robbins began to sound childish. My bookshelves smiled with new weights and colors. Rejected though it might have felt, my faded, lightweight pocketbook of "The Carpetbaggers" still found a place between my new loves.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and after that to UCLA. My family didn't leave Lebanon. Our house in the mountains survived seven years of the war. With the open involvement of the Israelis, and the Americans soon after, my parents knew that the house and our village were no longer safe. My mother packed the valuables, the sentimental and the expensive, and shut down the house.

She saved many of my books. Now, in San Francisco, I have a few hard covers from those days: Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, the Sea" and "Henry and Cato," John Fowles' "The Magus" and "Daniel Martin," "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare," and the book that I treasure most, V.S. Naipaul's "A House for Mr. Biswas." She didn't save any of the pocketbooks, definitely not "The Carpetbaggers."

In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted. Toilets, faucets, wiring, pipes, bathtubs, furniture, bookshelves, everything was gone.

But in one of the corners of the room lay the old copy of "The Carpetbaggers." It no longer had a cover, and some of the pages were missing. Ragged, it barely hung together. It was the only thing in the room that wasn't stolen.

I didn't take it. I didn't even pick it up. I left it there. I thought it was too dirty or something. I never saw it again.

Years later, I would begin to write. I no longer had the unfettered time to read everything in sight. My tastes narrowed. Close friends consider me a literary snob.

I had a dinner party not too long ago. One of those friends arrived bearing a gift. He intended it as camp, to make fun of me a bit, to pinprick my pretensions. Not knowing anything about my history with the book, he'd found an early edition hardcover of "The Carpetbaggers" at a garage sale for one whole dollar, a used copy, clean and crisp. He bought it for me as a joke. He was stunned when I nearly burst into tears upon receiving it.

As I write this in my study, the book sits before me in one of my bookshelves. All I have to do is turn my eyes slightly right of the computer screen, and I can see it, at home between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marilynne Robinson.

Dec. 17

Jane Smiley

Author of "Some Luck"

Giving and receiving books was a regular pastime in my family. I remember being very proud of myself as I watched my mother unwrap her present and discover the volume of Richard Nixon's "Six Crises" that I had chosen (thinking myself a genius for doing so). Perhaps she smiled, or perhaps she only looked perplexed. The best gift she ever gave me was the World Book Encyclopedia, sold to her, of course, by a traveling salesman and no doubt bought on credit. I was 7. I read the 20 volumes religiously, and not only the articles on horses and dogs. I loved the pictures and the conversational tone, and so even though I couldn't actually hold one in my lap, I would open it flat and lie there on my stomach, exploring one new world after another.

Dec. 16

Simon Rich

Author of "Spoiled Brats"

When I was 14, a relative gave me an SAT prep book for Hanukkah. It was called "500 Essential SAT Words" and it really freaked me out. I didn't know any of the words. Even "essential" was pretty fuzzy. If I wanted to become a writer, I needed to master this book quickly, promptly, expeditiously.

"If I'm not assiduous about this," I told my friend, Jake. "It'll be deleterious to me."

By the end of ninth grade, my writing was packed with essential words. I showed some short stories to Jake, expecting praise, commendation, obeisance.

"These suck," he told me. I reread my stories and saw that he was right. My writing was tedious, bromidic, irksome. It sucked hard.

Later that day, I threw out that stupid vocab book. It felt euphoric, ecstatic, well, no, not really. Just plain good.

Dec. 15

Laird Hunt

Author of "Neverhome"

In the fall of 1996, I moved from Paris to New York, where Tim Davis, then a junior editor at New Directions and now photographer, handed me a pre-publication copy of "The Emigrants" by W.G. Sebald. I had never in my then still young writing life read anything like it. By the time Sebald came to the city for the launch some weeks later, I had read it twice — the first time quickly the second time slowly — and had specific questions to put to him. That fall I was working on a quiet novel set in rural Indiana, and what Sebald was doing with text and image, his meditations on memory and history, his privileging of the vanished worlds and people that continue, always, to haunt us, helped me to move forward with it in a way that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. It is close to 20 years since that gift from Tim Davis. I am still grateful.

Dec. 14Emily St. John Mandel

Author of Station Eleven

When I was a child, my mother gave me a copy of "Alice in Wonderland." I can't, if I'm to be honest, remember a moment when she explicitly told me that the book was mine. But I grew up with it, it was always there in the bookshelves in my bedroom, and by the time I left home at 18, it was important enough to take with me in the suitcase to Toronto. I moved only with things that I could take with me on the airplane.

It isn't just any "Alice in Wonderland": it's an edition from the early part of the century, and it belonged to my grandmother. She stamped her name and wrote it in the first pages — Ella St. John — and much later, my mother wrote her name in those pages too. Their penmanship was lovely.

Sometime between childhood and now, the book's taken on the weight of a family heirloom. I wasn't close with my grandmother. She wasn't easy to know. But this book mattered to her, and afterward it mattered to my mother, enough that both of them marked the book with their names. I almost lost the book once, when I lent it to a friend who gave it away to someone else, and am haunted by the near-miss. How could I have let it slip out of my hands? It won't happen again.

Dec. 13

Tom Rachman

Author of "The Rise & Fall of Great Powers"

They tried their best. Poetry. Nonfiction. Novels. But no matter what my parents placed before me, I remained a hopeless case, devoted to movies and not much else. Then, when I was about 13, my father handed me a novel that he wanted ardently to discuss, "Darkness at Noon" by Arthur Koestler. I suppose that I wished for just such a discussion with him. So, I started it, and discovered a book of twisted characters in a Soviet prison, a backdrop of political manipulation, scenes of interrogation, mortal fear. The ending was indelible.

Nowadays, as a devoted book-lover, I wonder if those who spurn reading really are lost to the pleasure. Perhaps one needs the right book to intersect with the right stage of oneself — and the enticement of a good chat doesn't hurt.

Dec. 12

Rebecca Makkai

Author of "The Hundred-Year House"

On my 10th birthday, my father gave me a paperback copy of "Eugénie Grandet," by the 19th-century French writer Honoré de Balzac. Lest you think I was such a precocious child that this gift made sense: No. I loved to read, but my tastes ranged from Lois Lowry to "The Baby-Sitters Club." But then my father, a Hungarian émigré linguistics professor, was always handing me things early: wine, sordid family secrets, driving lessons. When I read the novel 20 years later, I was just as confounded by his selection. The book concerns a miserly man who interferes, to disastrous effect, in his daughter's life. I doubt my father meant anything profound by the choice; he is imperfect, but no miser. Or at least he was never miserly with the things that mattered: A wonderful and completely inexplicable trust in my maturity, for one. Books, for another. I mean, there are presents, and then there are gifts.

Dec. 11

Frederick Barthelme

Author of "There Must Be Some Mistake"

In some long ago world when I was a barely 20, I found myself flying back to Houston from a visit to New York. I was reading that perfect beach volume "Being and Time" by Martin Heidegger, because I was a pretentious little sod of a creature. The attractive stewardess (as we called them that back then) was friendly, and I was drawn to her immediately. I stared at her through the flight, made sure I asked for various items (soft drinks, peanuts, etc.) so that she would come to my seat. As the flight settled onto the tarmac at Houston Intercontinental, I hastily scrawled my name and phone number on Heidegger's title page and waited for the aircraft to come to a full stop at the terminal. As I went out the back door, the lovely stewardess touched my wrist and wished me well, and I handed her the great philosopher's most important work, showing her my name and phone on the title page. This is a wonderful book, I said. So interesting. You could call me when you finish and we could meet up and talk about it. She accepted the book and smiled her thanks. I am still waiting for the call.

Dec. 10

Leslie Jamison

Author of "The Empathy Exams"

When I was in high school, I gave everyone in my family — mother, father, two brothers — a copy of "Heart of Darkness" with one-quarter of a treasure map taped to the back. This was on Christmas. The map led to a tiny corner of our garden that I'd turned into a version of Colonel Kurtz's Inner Station: tiki torches in the dirt and stuffed animal monkeys hung from the side of a palm tree. It wasn't exactly that the darker aspects of the book had been lost on me — I loved the book for its darkness, its boldness, and its shameless unapologetic refusal to be subtle in any way imaginable — and at my progressive Los Angeles high school we'd been assigned post-colonial critiques to read alongside it. I think my wild treasure hunt was something more like an attempt to reclaim what had once felt wild and immersive about reading when I was younger — that sense of a journey, an absolute swallowing — an attempt to give that sense of immersion to everyone else.

Dec. 9

Walter Kirn

Author of "Blood Will Out"

Two years ago at Christmas my then-girlfriend, the writer Amanda Fortini, gave me my first copy of Joseph Campbell’s masterpiece of comparative mythology, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces." Like the Bible, it was one of those books that I half believed I’d read merely because I’d read so much about it (including the story that it had informed George Lucas’ conception of the "Star Wars" movies). The book itself was more intimate and haunting than I’d expected it to be. By way of describing what he called the “monomyth” about the adventures and trials of a great soul who is called to renew or save the world, Campbell intimates that living fully and deeply in our new world of buzzing hyperactivity (little did he know in 1949 just how busy existence would get) is becoming dangerously difficult. We are all authors of our own stories, he teaches, and we need time and space to work them out. Life is a literary undertaking, and the hero has just one face, finally: one’s own.

Dec. 8

Karen Abbott

Author of "Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy"

In 2001, when I was 28 years old, I made two major decisions: to quit my job at a Philadelphia newspaper and have my second reconstructive knee surgery, a four-hour procedure in which a tendon was snipped to create a new ligament and donor cartilage was harvested from a cadaver to be screwed into my bone. I spent the next six months prone on the couch in a state of ferocious misery, my left leg bound to a machine that bent and straightened it for me. I was burned out from journalism and had no career prospects or plans beyond a vague notion that I might want to write a book — subject matter as yet undetermined.

My mother sent a care package, including a few books she’d picked up at a thrift store. One, published by a Colorado-based survivalist press, was titled "Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors." The byline — “Rex Feral” — was an obvious pseudonym; the Latin translation is “king of the wild beasts.” In 1983, I discovered, someone followed the book’s instructions to murder a disabled boy, his nurse and his mother. The victims’ families sued the publisher, claiming it aided and abetted the killer, and the case became a First Amendment cause célèbre. But lost in the brouhaha was a simple question no one seemed to ask: Who wrote this murder manual? Who was Rex Feral?

I found her — yes, it was a her — and spent the next few years researching and writing her story. Although I never sold that book, both my knee and psyche healed during the time I spent working on it, and I decided to try again. I had better luck the next time: "Sin in the Second City," my true tale of a world-famous brothel in 1900s Chicago, sold in June 2005. My friend Rex Feral was the first person I told.

Dec. 7

Jonathan Eig

Author of "The Birth of the Pill"

When I was in high school, I gave my younger brother a paperback copy of Kerouac's "On the Road." It was the orange paperback with the hazy sun burning under the title. I hadn't read it. All I knew was that it had something to do with rebelliousness, and my brother was the family rebel. He wasn't much of a reader, and I thought Kerouac might be the kind of writer who'd get through to him. Years later when he finally gave it a chance, it hit him square in the gut in a way only certain books can hit at certain times in a reader's life. It's still his favorite book and it's the best book gift I ever gave.

Dec. 6

Maureen Corrigan

Author of "So We Read On"

I was 8 years old when I woke up on Christmas morning and found "The Secret of The Old Clock" by Carolyn Keene stuffed into my Christmas stocking. It's certainly not the best book I've ever received as a gift, but this very first Nancy Drew mystery (originally published in 1930) probably has had as much influence over my life as a reader as the serious literature I later came to admire. Long before I ever learned that Edgar Allan Poe called his detective fiction stories, "tales of ratiocination," I loved that 18-year-old Nancy used her brains to crack cases that baffled the adults. I also loved the antiquated language that summoned up a refined world of "luncheons" and "roadsters" far removed from blue-collar Queens where I grew up. I've been a mystery reader, reviewer and scholar most of my adult life, and it all began with that book with the yellow spine, depicting a "titian-haired" Nancy kneeling in the grass opening up a clock. I still have it.

Dec. 5

Geoff Dyer

Author of "Another Great Day at Sea"

I met the photographer Henry Wessel several years ago at a symposium in San Francisco entitled "Is Photography Over?" We spoke briefly, he was extremely charming and then, some weeks later, sent me a beautiful five-volume edition of his work published by Steidl. Each of the slender albums of black-and-white photographs was organized around a theme or subject — Real Estate, Las Vegas, Night Walks, etc. — and all were enclosed in a slip case. I love slip cases so much that I'm often reluctant to take the books out of them but in this case — so to speak — I spent ages poring over the delicate, subtle, soft gray of his images. I love the way each of the books is a distinct body of work while the whole thing has a cohesion and comprehensiveness greater than the sum of its parts.

Dec. 4

Edan Lepucki

Author of "California"

When I was in elementary school, my mother would drive me across town to Children's Book World in West L.A. On our most memorable trips, my mom bought me a copy of "Anne of Green Gables" by L.M. Montgomery. I started it in the car just a few minutes later, and I remember how I huddled with the book in the front passenger seat, thrilled at how advanced it seemed: An orphan girl! In Canada! What small print! I asked my mom what "abundant" was and committed her answer to memory. I loved the book, and over the next two years read through Montgomery's entire oeuvre. What's special about this particular trip with my mom was how ordinary it was; for us, buying books was as routine as grocery shopping, and just as essential. My mom understood the power and fun and magic of books. Now I have the opportunity, and duty, to pass that inheritance to my own son.

Dec. 3

Stuart Dybek

Author of "Paper Lantern" and "Ecstatic Cahoots"

Long before e-books were an option, I had two tests that measured how much I valued a particular book. Test One: Would I give it as a gift? Different reading tastes meant guesswork was involved, but part of the fun was coming up with a book that a friend would cherish and might not have found on his own.

The second, I thought of as the Canned Peaches Test after a passage in Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." In that story, Nick Adams, toting camping gear and a backpack of supplies, hikes to a trout stream in Michigan. At supper, he opens canned peaches in syrup, a delicacy he feels he's earned since he was willing to lug it in. The e-book makes that test obsolete. One can carry the weight of the collected Hemingway on his palm.

I travel now with books in both formats. I always bring a book of poetry in hard copy. A volume of poetry is often thinner, but heft alone tells nothing about the size of a book's heart.

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